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"What makes LA Noire so good as a filmic experience holds it back as a game"

Arthur C Clarke once wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic. I imagine that's how anyone who hasn't played a computer game since, say, Doom or Sonic the Hedgehog might feel about LA Noire. The game, set in the police force of Los Angeles in the 1940s, is both very new and very traditional.

The novelty comes from its unique motion-capture system. Instead of blank-eyed heads parrotting clunky lines at you, LA Noire's characters deliver the sharp script with a mixture of grimaces, shifty eyes, nervous tics and eerily recognisable mannerisms. (The likenesses are so good that you can play a rewarding meta-game of "spot the American character actor": veterans of Heroes, Dexter and Buffy appear.)

The story follows an LAPD officer, Cole Phelps (played by Aaron Staton, Mad Men's Ken Cosgrove), who is not long back from fighting the Japanese at Okinawa. He's a by-the-book cop in a motley police department, trying to bring justice to a Los Angeles that's just as corrupt as that of the films LA Confidential or Chinatown.

The movie references are particularly apt here, because this is a game that aspires, above all, to be cinematic. There's the budget, for a start -- reportedly upwards of $50m -- which has enabled Rockstar to create an exquisitely detailed game world, complete with period cars and clothes (not to mention some very period attitudes to race and gender). The music, too, is subtly excellent, with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong to drive to and wailing jazz stings to indicate the presence of clues at crime scenes.

For me, however, the most innovative aspect of LA Noire is the maturity of its storyline: there's none of the sniggering puerility of Rockstar's major franchise, Grand Theft Auto. Even better, Cole Phelps's character develops over the course of the story; something that is all too rare with video game protagonists and has inhibited their ability to provoke empathy.

The irony is that what makes LA Noire so good as a filmic experience sometimes holds it back as a game. Despite its huge map and cast of characters, the game is tightly linear. In this, it's more like a traditional point-and-click adventure, such as Monkey Island, than the more recent -- and similarly cinematic -- Heavy Rain, where your choices have more far-reaching consequences. Also, the game is sometimes so keen to help you get things right, with sounds and vibrations aiding you to find clues, and your partner chipping in if you're making a real hash of things, that you can feel like a passenger rather than a protagonist.

Nonetheless, LA Noire is an ambitious and successful game, extraordinary both in what it is and in what it represents for the industry. And there is one key respect in which it differs from a film: in the age of the 90-minute megaplex blockbuster, it demands more than 20 hours of your time to tell a sprawling, dark, mature and intricately connected story.

Helen Lewis-Hasteley is an assistant editor of the New Statesman. She tweets: @helenlewis

Leader: The unresolved Eurozone crisis

The eurozone crisis was never resolved. It was merely conveniently forgotten. The vote for Brexit, the terrible war in Syria and Donald Trump’s election as US president all distracted from the single currency’s woes. Yet its contradictions endure, a permanent threat to continental European stability and the future cohesion of the European Union.

The resignation of the Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, following defeat in a constitutional referendum on 4 December, was the moment at which some believed that Europe would be overwhelmed. Among the champions of the No campaign were the anti-euro Five Star Movement (which has led in some recent opinion polls) and the separatist Lega Nord. Opponents of the EU, such as Nigel Farage, hailed the result as a rejection of the single currency.

An Italian exit, if not unthinkable, is far from inevitable, however. The No campaign comprised not only Eurosceptics but pro-Europeans such as the former prime minister Mario Monti and members of Mr Renzi’s liberal-centrist Democratic Party. Few voters treated the referendum as a judgement on the monetary union.

To achieve withdrawal from the euro, the populist Five Star Movement would need first to form a government (no easy task under Italy’s complex multiparty system), then amend the constitution to allow a public vote on Italy’s membership of the currency. Opinion polls continue to show a majority opposed to the return of the lira.

But Europe faces far more immediate dangers. Italy’s fragile banking system has been imperilled by the referendum result and the accompanying fall in investor confidence. In the absence of state aid, the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, could soon face ruin. Italy’s national debt stands at 132 per cent of GDP, severely limiting its firepower, and its financial sector has amassed $360bn of bad loans. The risk is of a new financial crisis that spreads across the eurozone.

EU leaders’ record to date does not encourage optimism. Seven years after the Greek crisis began, the German government is continuing to advocate the failed path of austerity. On 4 December, Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, declared that Greece must choose between unpopular “structural reforms” (a euphemism for austerity) or withdrawal from the euro. He insisted that debt relief “would not help” the immiserated country.

Yet the argument that austerity is unsustainable is now heard far beyond the Syriza government. The International Monetary Fund is among those that have demanded “unconditional” debt relief. Under the current bailout terms, Greece’s interest payments on its debt (roughly €330bn) will continually rise, consuming 60 per cent of its budget by 2060. The IMF has rightly proposed an extended repayment period and a fixed interest rate of 1.5 per cent. Faced with German intransigence, it is refusing to provide further funding.

Ever since the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi, declared in 2012 that he was prepared to do “whatever it takes” to preserve the single currency, EU member states have relied on monetary policy to contain the crisis. This complacent approach could unravel. From the euro’s inception, economists have warned of the dangers of a monetary union that is unmatched by fiscal and political union. The UK, partly for these reasons, wisely rejected membership, but other states have been condemned to stagnation. As Felix Martin writes on page 15, “Italy today is worse off than it was not just in 2007, but in 1997. National output per head has stagnated for 20 years – an astonishing . . . statistic.”

Germany’s refusal to support demand (having benefited from a fixed exchange rate) undermined the principles of European solidarity and shared prosperity. German unemployment has fallen to 4.1 per cent, the lowest level since 1981, but joblessness is at 23.4 per cent in Greece, 19 per cent in Spain and 11.6 per cent in Italy. The youngest have suffered most. Youth unemployment is 46.5 per cent in Greece, 42.6 per cent in Spain and 36.4 per cent in Italy. No social model should tolerate such waste.

“If the euro fails, then Europe fails,” the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has often asserted. Yet it does not follow that Europe will succeed if the euro survives. The continent that once aspired to be a rival superpower to the US is now a byword for decline, and ethnic nationalism and right-wing populism are thriving. In these circumstances, the surprise has been not voters’ intemperance, but their patience.